Colburn School

The Colburn School in downtown Los Angeles is launching a new Recovered Voices series with conductor James Conlon that will present performances, seminars and other events focused on composers whose careers were cut short during the Holocaust. Conlon launched Recovered Voices in 2006 at Los Angeles Opera, but the company put the series on indefinite hiatus in 2010 because of budgetary reasons. The new Recovered Voices at the Colburn is being funded by a $1-million grant from Marilyn Ziering, the philanthropist and L.A. Opera board member.

The Colburn School in downtown Los Angeles will be partnering with the L.A. Dance Project to create a new program designed to train young dancers between the ages of 14 and 19. The newly announced Colburn Dance Academy, which is scheduled to launch this fall, will be a program offering dance instruction and education with an emphasis on ballet technique. Jenifer Ringer, a former principal dancer with the New York City Ballet who retired from the company earlier this month, will lead the new academy.

I was fortunate enough to have been among the guests invited to the opening of the Colburn School of Performing Arts two Sundays ago. Since CalArts will be a neighbor of the Colburn School once our own new theater opens at the Walt Disney Concert Hall site, it was with particular interest that I made my way among the assembled civic, arts and education leaders into this gracious new building.

The Colburn School in downtown Los Angeles is launching a new Recovered Voices series with conductor James Conlon that will present performances, seminars and other events focused on composers whose careers were cut short during the Holocaust. Conlon launched Recovered Voices in 2006 at Los Angeles Opera, but the company put the series on indefinite hiatus in 2010 because of budgetary reasons. The new Recovered Voices at the Colburn is being funded by a $1-million grant from Marilyn Ziering, the philanthropist and L.A. Opera board member.

At first glance, it looked like a typical music rehearsal. There at the Colburn School in downtown L.A. were Leann Osterkamp, 22, and Siyi Fang, 25, sitting at pianos playing "Songfest: A Cycle of American Poets" by composer Leonard Bernstein. It was who was watching them and offering instruction that was unusual. Hovering nearby was Michael Barrett, a former assistant to Bernstein and the first ever to play the four-hand piano piece with Bernstein. He offered the women advice on how the maestro, who died in 1990, wanted his piece to be played.

On Sunday, the Colburn School of Performing Arts will dedicate its new home alongside the Museum of Contemporary Art and the future site of the Music Center's Walt Disney Concert Hall. Although parts of the school have been open for months, the school's formal unveiling marks the arrival of the latest addition to a string of projects meant to transform downtown Los Angeles' Grand Avenue into a bustling cultural haven.

In a music instruction room, 9-year-old Eric Liang of Fullerton scrunches his face for a flicker of a moment as he plays a composition for the violin by Fritz Kreisler. The problem isn't his playing or the music. From the classroom on the other side of the wall comes the thundering of drums. In a much larger room where Ballet I is under way, three young girls do their steps while facing a broad mirror.

"It's a completely new experience," said Matthew Zuber, a 21-year-old bassoonist studying at the Colburn School. "I've never done an opera before. " He was referring to his participation -- along with 21 other young musicians at the downtown conservatory -- in a new collaboration between Colburn and Los Angeles Opera's Domingo-Thornton Young Artist Program. That union gets its first showcase this weekend, when the combined forces present two one-act operas: Ernst Krenek's "The Secret Kingdom" and Viktor Ullmann's "The Emperor of Atlantis.

A crowd of construction workers, some sporting T-shirts reading "I Built the Colburn School of Performing Arts 1997-1998," sat on the dust-filled steps of the facility's new 416-seat auditorium a month before seats--and students--were scheduled to arrive. Munching on chicken-and-pesto sandwiches provided by their hosts, they peered intently at the stage. Out walked 12-year-old Cynthia Gong, Timothy Braun, also 12, and 11-year-old Eugenia Chang, wearing hard hats of their own.

Richard D. Colburn, a wealthy businessman whose own dreams of being a professional musician fueled his generous and lifelong commitment to music and music education, died Thursday at his home in Beverly Hills. He was 92. "He'd been very tired the last few days," said his daughter, Carol Colburn Hogel. "But, still, this was unexpected."

SongFest is the remarkable summer vocal training program, begun in 1996, formerly at Pepperdine University and currently housed at the Colburn School. "Songfest" is Leonard Bernstein's dozen songs for six singers and orchestra, written as a contribution to the U.S. bicentennial festivities in 1976 (but not finished until 1977). On Saturday night, SongFest finally caught up with "Songfest. " This was only the second full Los Angeles performance of Bernstein's complete score. When the composer conducted the West Coast premiere with the Los Angeles Philharmonic at the Hollywood Bowl in 1983, then-Times music critic Martin Bernheimer, in these pages, called that the wrong place.

At first glance, it looked like a typical music rehearsal. There at the Colburn School in downtown L.A. were Leann Osterkamp, 22, and Siyi Fang, 25, sitting at pianos playing "Songfest: A Cycle of American Poets" by composer Leonard Bernstein. It was who was watching them and offering instruction that was unusual. Hovering nearby was Michael Barrett, a former assistant to Bernstein and the first ever to play the four-hand piano piece with Bernstein. He offered the women advice on how the maestro, who died in 1990, wanted his piece to be played.

The Britten year in Los Angeles has begun with a bang. This weekend, you can hear Britten in Walt Disney Concert Hall, at Jacaranda in Santa Monica -- and most of all, in the Colburn School's Zipper Hall where the ever-on-the-move sparkplug James Conlon is presiding over an extraordinary marathon of songs and opera that rarely get a live hearing in this country. For starters Thursday night, in a setting that imaginatively re-invents the format of an art song recital, there was a long “prelude” of often stark songs by Benjamin Britten and others by his teachers Frank Bridge and John Ireland and his foremost predecessor in English opera, Henry Purcell.

Two years ago Alexei Lubimov, the peculiar Russian polymath pianist, made a rare appearance in Los Angeles to open the season of Monday Evening Concerts at the Colburn School's Zipper Concert Hall. He was back Monday to do the same. He proved no less strange this time around. Lubimov's program on Monday began with Satie and ended with Debussy, not a big stretch, it might seem, the two French composers having been friends and having influenced each other. In between came three short prepared piano pieces by John Cage from the 1940s that were written at a time when Satie was much on Cage's mind.

Before conducting the Colburn Orchestra at Walt Disney Concert Hall on Sunday night, across the street from the newly renamed Colburn Way (one block of 2nd Street), the renowned British conductor Neville Marriner was handed the Richard D. Colburn Award in a small ceremony on stage. Marriner was the first music director of the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, which Richard D. Colburn, Los Angeles' legendary music benefactor, helped bankroll. The concert was presented by the Colburn School in honor of the centenary of its founder, who died at 92 in 2004.

"It's a completely new experience," said Matthew Zuber, a 21-year-old bassoonist studying at the Colburn School. "I've never done an opera before. " He was referring to his participation -- along with 21 other young musicians at the downtown conservatory -- in a new collaboration between Colburn and Los Angeles Opera's Domingo-Thornton Young Artist Program. That union gets its first showcase this weekend, when the combined forces present two one-act operas: Ernst Krenek's "The Secret Kingdom" and Viktor Ullmann's "The Emperor of Atlantis.

Colburn exec: Miguel Angel Corzo, president of the University of the Arts in Philadelphia and a former director of the Getty Conservation Institute in L.A., has been named president of the Colburn School in downtown L.A. Beginning in July, he will oversee both the Colburn School of Performing Arts and the Colburn Conservatory of Music.

Armadillo phone number--The wrong phone number appeared in the music listings in Sunday's Calendar for the Armadillo String Quartet, performing Wednesday at the Colburn School. The information phone number is: (310) 446-6358.

Nigel Armstrong, a 21-year-old recent graduate of L.A.'s Colburn School, has made the violin finals in classical music's equivalent of the Olympics — the quadrennial International Tchaikovsky Competition in Russia that's best known stateside for Van Cliburn's triumph during the inaugural running in 1958. Americans celebrated it as a victory over the Soviets on their own turf during those Cold War days, and Cliburn, a pianist from Texas, returned to a ticker tape parade on Manhattan's Broadway and lionization on the cover of Time magazine.

Arts patron Anne Bass never intended to become a filmmaker, but somehow she ended up directing and producing "Dancing Across Borders," a documentary she presented in Beverly Hills on Tuesday. The screening benefited Center Dance Arts, which supports the performance series and educational programs of "Glorya Kaufman Presents Dance at the Music Center." "I fell into it sideways," Bass said, explaining that she originally hired a director to string together the footage of Sokvannara (Sy)